SuperpatternsPat Patterson on the Cloud, Identity and Single Malt Scotch

My current work involves writing my first Linux block device driver. Going to the web to find a sample, I discovered Jonathan Corbet's Simple Block Driver article with its associated block driver example code. It's a nice succinct implementation of a ramdisk - pretty much the simplest working block device. There's only one problem, though, the article was written in 2003, when kernel 2.6.0 was the new kid on the block. Trying to build it on openSUSE 11.2 with kernel 2.6.31 just produced a slew of compile errors. A bit of research revealed that there were major changes to the kernel block device interface in 2.6.31, so I would have to port the example to get it working.

About a day and a half of poring through the kernel source and the excellent LDD3 (hardcopy) later, I had a running simple block driver for kernel 2.6.31. I've also tested it successfully on SUSE 11 SP1 Beta, which uses kernel 2.6.32. Here's the code, followed by instructions for getting it working.

sbd_request() uses the blk_fetch_request(), blk_rq_pos(), blk_rq_cur_sectors() and __blk_end_request_cur() functions rather than elv_next_request(), req->sector, req->current_nr_sectors and end_request() respectively. The structure of the loop also changes so we handle each sector from the request individually. One outstanding task for me is to investigate whether req->buffer holds all of the data for the entire request, so I can handle it all in one shot, rather than sector-by-sector. My first attempt resulted in the (virtual) machine hanging when I installed the driver, so I clearly need to do some more work in this area!

The driver implements the getgeo operation (in sbd_getgeo), rather than ioctl, since blkdev_ioctl now handles HDIO_GETGEO by calling the driver's getgeo function. This is a nice simplification since it moves a copy_to_user call out of each driver and into the kernel.

Before building, ensure you have the kernel source, headers, gcc, make etc - if you've read this far, you likely have all this and/or know how to get it, so I won't spell it all out here. You'll also need to go to the kernel source directory and do the following to prepare your build environment, if you have not already done so:

cd /usr/src/`uname -r`
make oldconfig && make prepare

Now, back in the directory with the sbd source, you can build it:

make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` modules

You'll see a warning about 'Version' being defined, but not used, but don't worry about that :-). Now we can load the module, partition the ramdisk, make a filesystem, mount it, and create a file:

Hopefully this all works for you, and is as useful for you as it has been for me. Many thanks to Jonathan for the original version and the excellent LDD3. One final piece of housekeeping - although the comment at the top of sbd.c mentions only GPL, the MODULE_LICENSE macro specifies "Dual BSD/GPL". I am interpreting the original code as being under the dual GPL/BSD license and this version is similarly dual licensed.